ChemMatters - February 2016

LEX WOULDN’T NORMALLY BE CAUGHT DEAD IN A FRENCH RESTAURANT but it’s prom night, and Lucy seems to think gowns and tuxes go with ratatouille and bouillabaisse. So here they are—surrounded by white tablecloths, candle centerpieces, and more forks than Alex knows what to do with. What to talk about? There’s at least an hour before the dance starts.

Lucy looks at the forks, and she is also mystified. What did she get herself into, asking to come here? The waiter saves them from the uncomfortable silence, offering the menu from memory. Alex hears the waiter say “mussels” and latches on to that. “We’ll start with the mussels.” Lucy smiles.

The waiter brings them a bowl each, a larger one “for the shells,” he murmurs, and, eventually, a platter of blue shells, thin but long, steamed open to reveal ovals of amber-colored meat.

Lucy watches the waiter leave and then gently pokes one of the shells on the platter. “My mom’s been talking about these recently.”

Alex groans inside. Not another story about her mom, the awesome surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. How is he supposed to bring up his prom surprise if she is raving about her mom?

Lucy notices the look on his face.

“I promise it’s cool.”

Alex’s eyebrows go up.

“And bloody.” She tries again.

Alex grins. “Sure this is the right place for that?”

Lucy turns over the mussel with a spoon. “Right here is where the beard would be. Cooks take it off to make them look better to eat. Mussels use their beards to stick to stuff, right?” she says.

Alex shrugs: “Sure.”
“Well, the hope is that you can use mussel
glue to hold people’s organs together after
you operate on them. Right now we use
sutures, little stitches, but sometimes those
get infected.”
Just great, Alex thinks. How is he supposed
to go from surgery to his romantic surprise?

“So the surgeon is in the operating room with somebody cut open on the table,” Lucy says, tossing a mussel shell into the larger bowl, “with blood and fluids all over.”

Alex groans. Lucy smiles at him and goes on. “What can the surgeon do? She needs something that will help hold the organs and tissues together inside the body. Where, you know, it’s wet. So Elmer’s isn’t going to work. They use a different type of glue called a bioglue, which works like mussel glue. They’ve tried out this glue with rats, and it’s really strong.”

Lucy remembers her mom saying that the mussel glue works so well because of proteins the mussels use to bind to rocks underwater. Her mother told her that the mussel glue contains long molecules formed by the covalent bonding of repeating smaller molecules known as amino acids.

“How does the mussel use this glue?” Alex asks.

“The mussel has a foot that mashes down against a surface, which pushes all the water out. Then the foot injects its sticky stuff against a rock, a ship, or another hard surface.”